VeloVoices Advent Calendar 18: Swiss summer

We’re still in the mountains, this time in Switzerland, courtesy of Ian Walton

The picture : Swiss summer

I spend a fair bit of the last year doing some photography and marketing for a bike travel company and I got to go on a few recce trips – like this one in Switzerland to ride two of my favourite passes: the Furka and the Gotthard. In some ways I was lucky that my mate wasn’t really feeling it with the weather and built up fatigue from a tough month, so I got to ride the Gotthard pass alone: peaceful, challenging and calming, it feels a unique place. Cobbled up to over 2,000m, switchbacks and on the day I did it, shrouded in patchy cloud – beneath and above me.

This shot, though, has more importance for me in a wider context of the year and beyond going forward. I managed to haul my mate out of the van to ride the Furka with me. A shared ride on one of the best roads you can find, in ‘epic’ weather, making future plans. All in all, those high mountains of Switzerland were a contemplative voyage of discovery. As ever, I wanted to try and capture the emotion of the moment, of the day. To capture some of that escape, the contemplation.

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Follow Ian as The Musette on Twitter, Instagram and his website. Check out the features we’ve done with him in the past. 

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